Though history well tell you that many movie franchises tend to peter out once they surpass the third installment, Paramount’s Mission: Impossible has gone from strength to strength. Six years ago, Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol stormed to a whopping $690 million at the international box office, while Christopher McQuarrie’s excellent Rogue Nation landed in the same financial ballpark in 2015 – $682 million, to be exact.
If nothing else, it proves the Tom Cruise-fronted series still retains its status as one of Hollywood’s more lucrative action tentpoles, and Paramount, Cruise and McQuarrie have accepted their next assignment: Mission: Impossible 6.
With a July 27th, 2018 release date in place, the studio is slowly beginning to gear up for Ethan Hunt’s next globe-trotting adventure and thanks to Empire, we know it’ll officially enter production in Paris on April 10th. The outlet caught up with writer-director Christopher McQuarrie – who has worked with Cruise in the past thanks to Jack Reacher – and it was here that McQuarrie assured fans that MI6 will feature “a very different Ethan Hunt, I can promise you that.”
“It starts in a very unconventional way. It does not start with action. That was the hardest pitch of this movie. I’ve seen five of these movies and I don’t know who Ethan Hunt is. One movie sort of dealt with his personal life; the other movies are about people speculating what’s really going on in Ethan’s head. I want to know who Ethan is in this movie, I want an emotional journey for this character, and Tom really embraced it.”
For a franchise that is in many ways defined by its engrossing action sequences – the Burj Khalifa stunt, Rogue Nation‘s airplane chase – Christopher McQuarrie stressed his desire to cut through the noise in order to “deal with character.”
“’I don’t want to string together a bunch of action scenes, I want to actually deal with character’. So I put Ethan in a bunch of complicated moral quandaries, and I’m trying to find ways to connect them – and then, ironically, the way to connect them was through giant action scenes.”
So, there you have it; Mission: Impossible 6 kicks off in April – April 10th, to be specific – when the French capital will be playing host to Christopher McQuarrie’s action sequel. Tom Cruise is back, back, back as the illustrious Ethan Hunt, but who are those “old faces” that McQuarrie is referring to? We’ll find out soon enough.
